CD Drivers/Windows Issue

Now, I've been steadily trying to fix my computer for the last month and a half. It got FUBARed, bad. Wouldn't load Windows XP and wouldn't recognize the CD drives (or so I thought). When I went to use the XP CD to do a repair install it didn't work, just would not recognize the CD. Now, prior to all this I knew my D drive, the DVD one didn't work (lens unclea or such) and didn't fix it. Now today I tried using the floppy drive to access the repair console via the 6 disks. I Tried copying files over from my E drive (the CD drive that a Dell diagnostic disk said worked and I could have sworn didn't) to the C drive and it worked though the green light on front did not light up (but it was indeed spinning and copying the file over)! So, is it possible that when I boot the IDE CD Drives using F12 that the computer is just checking my D drive then skipping my E?
But anyways now that I've found that I can access the Windows XP CD would anyone know how I could go about repairing my Windows XP installation so I can access my computer again via Windows? I've tried repairing it using the 6 floppy disks but it just tells me to insert the freaking Windows XP CD-ROM when I click on the install portion suggested by http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm (the first time it worked, but was unable to find around 30 files on the disk so was unable to overwrite them, sadly, I only have a few of those files written down out of the vein hope it would work)!

And no, I still can't access the CD drive at start-up, I need to use the 6 disks to get to the repair console to do so.

Should I try to repair the CD drive and all components via the work around I found (and how would I do so)?
Do I get a CD drive cleaner and see if I can get D drive working again?
Is there something significant in the fact that the green light did not appear when the CD drive was in fact being used to copy over files and is that a clue to what file is missing to hopefully get the computer to recognize it again?
Does the computer actually skip one of your CD drives when it searches for them via option 5 in the F12 menu or is this part of my problem?
Is there any further information I could get you guys via diagnostic disks etc?
And who do I send the fruit baskets to if we can manage to find a solution to this crap?

Up until now, I was ready to erase all my files (but of course, I could not recall how to do so without use of the friggin' OS) and none of the stuff I found could tell you how to clean the drive completely without the dern OS. I really wanna try and save my dang stuff especially now that I know I can sneak my way onto the CD drive.

(also, my computer has not received any new hardware onto it, this is the set-up it's had since arriving on my doorstep)

Thanks in advance!